The recurring theme of these raindrop paintings is the clarity of the water, the path the water has traveled to its location and the nostalgia such images invoke. Like a film noir still, this painting confront the viewer and bring forth memories from previous times. The fuzzy, off-center colors behind the window are just as we think they should be. As we drive along the interstate of our lives our memories grow hazier in the distance much like looking through the side windows of a moving car and only seeing colors without clear, definitive shapes. These images fade into the distance and while we may remember their general shape or color, they are no longer present and instead become part of our memory. How distorted our memory of these events are is what I am trying to capture. The reality as it happens—looking out of a window on a rainy day—is never remembered exactly as it was. Even as memories fade or age, we transform this prior reality. Individually we take details and exaggerate them to fit our needs. Maybe we finished in third place in that race but it was the best race we ran and as such in its retelling we finished second because the other racer had a false start that the officials missed. We should have “been first”. We aspire to be first; we want our memories to make us first and in many cases it requires manipulating these past moments."

BIOGRAPHY

Shay Kun is an Israeli-born and New York-based artist. He earned his B.F.A. at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (1998), and went on to earn his M.F.A. from Goldsmiths College in London, England (2000). Kun has been showing extensively in the past several years nationally as well as on the international circuit, mainly across the U.S and Europe. The culmination of this process was the development of an acute awareness of his specific place in today’s visual culture–somewhere between the historical concept of fine art and the contemporary digital and electronic imagery so central to his generation’s experience.

Kun has most recently exhibited his work at Hezi Cohen Gallery in Tel Aviv as well as participated in a group show, Jew York, at Untitled Gallery in New York. He will have an upcoming exhibition in 2014 with Michael Shultz Gallery in Berlin, Germany.